The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that consumers in the United States purchase three (3) billion Primary batteries per year. Today, an estimated 80%-90% of these batteries end up discarded in landfills. The website ESHO.com reports that in 1989, over 600 tons of consumer dry-cell batteries were discarded into landfills. These batteries contain zinc, lead, nickel, alkalines, manganese, cadmium, silver, and mercury—heavy metals and other materials which can pose environmental and health hazards. One key reason these batteries are discarded into the standard consumer waste-stream is because of a lack of widely distributed, convenient recycle drop-off stations and the lack of municipal “curbside” recycling support for batteries. Consumers generally do not know where to recycle batteries, or are required to make special “out of the way” trips to central recycling centers—an inconvenient process that faces strong customer resistance.
Today, the standard consumer “retail-available” Primary batteries (e.g., including form factors such as AAA, AA, C, D and 9-volt, etc.) use alkaline chemistry, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkaline_battery). Because these types of batteries are mass produced and the product of continued improvements, consumers have grown to expect a high level of performance, in particular, high energy density (battery capacity). In addition, the batteries are inexpensive, convenient (fully charged when purchased), and readily available world-wide. However, as noted above, single-use are environmentally damaging, and as compared to Secondary batteries, are much more expensive over a typical lifetime of battery use.
Historically, consumer experience with and perception of Secondary batteries has largely been poor. The most common Secondary battery type until recently has been Nickel-cadmium (“NiCad”) batteries, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel-cadmium_battery). These batteries, produced in volumes as high as 1.5 Billion units per year, suffer from numerous major problems—limited energy density, expense, overly-fast self-discharge rate, and “memory.” While these batteries have been extensively “embedded” in consumer devices, they are losing ground significantly to new technologies due to such problems. Likewise, consumers have largely abandoned using NiCad batteries as direct replacements for “retail-available” Primary batteries such as AAA, A, C, D and 9-volt batteries. Today, consumers maintain a very poor opinion of Secondary batteries. Manufacturers have all but stopped offering them in retail outlets due to poor consumer acceptance, so consumers have had few convenient options to purchase Secondary batteries.
However, in 2005, Sanyo Corp of Japan introduced consumer/retail oriented Secondary batteries based on new “Low Self Discharge” Nickel-metal Hydride (“NiMH”) battery technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel-metal_hydride——battery). The capacity, price and usability of this new type of Secondary battery has improved to the point that they are usable and acceptable as a replacement for Primary batteries in the “retail” application, and in some ways outperform Primary batteries. In addition to having similar energy density to alkaline batteries, the new NiMH batteries maintain their charge well on-the-shelf (enabling them to be pre-charged at the factory) and they do not have the “memory” effects that plagued NiCad batteries. These properties solve two of the key problems associated in consumer's minds with Secondary batteries. Additionally, NiMH batteries have somewhat less environmental impact than NiCad or other battery types that contain Cadmium.
However, these new NiMH batteries still have several key problems when compared to retail alkaline Primary batteries. Firstly, they cost more than alkaline batteries on an up-front basis. While the are tens or hundreds of times less expensive over the long-term, because they can be recharged up to 1,500 times, the up-front cost to the consumer for each battery is currently two or three times (or more) higher than that of standard alkaline batteries. In addition, consumers must buy recharging systems to take advantage of the rechargeable nature of the batteries, which imposes an additional up-front cost.
In addition, Secondary batteries require consumers to remove discharged batteries from their appliances/toys, place them into the recharging station, and wait several hours for full recharge cycles. Consumers must create a small battery charging area in their houses, and must buy additional “backup” batteries to have on hand if they want continuous usage of their battery-powered appliances.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,544,784, 5,694,019, 6,154,006 and 5,618,644 describe existing battery recharging kiosks and/or recharging circuitry. However, in our opinion, these existing concepts do not provide ease-of-use, mechanical reliability, capacity, safety, tracking and protection mechanisms sufficient to create a viable, reliable, cost-effective solution that meets the needs of consumers. In particular, existing kiosk patents and designs suffer from a number of problems, making them unsuitable to meet consumer needs and not economically viable. As a result, no company has built or deployed such kiosks on a broad scale.
One key problem that must be solved is the lack of capacity in existing kiosks. Kiosks must be able to dispense, recharge, and house a large number of batteries in a small space—to reduce personnel servicing costs and to adequately serve high-volume retails outlets (e.g., Walmart, Costco, etc.). Some current designs using linear storage arrays suffer from mechanical complexity and poor utilization of space. Other designs using gravity-fed or stacking mechanisms have insufficient ability to charge enough batteries quickly enough to consistently serve large volumes of customers—making the systems economically non-viable.
Another key problem is that previous, existing kiosk designs include intake and dispensing of batteries “one at a time.” Not only does this approach lengthen the throughput time for a transaction, but it also requires the mechanisms inside a kiosk to directly and individually handle, identify and properly disposition multiple battery form-factors. This in turn requires generically-configured transport mechanisms and/or grasping mechanisms that are unreliable and prone to failure and jamming, and that are too slow in operation to service large numbers of customers.
Another key problem is that household batteries in the AA, AAA, C, D and 9-volt form factors are standardized, and as such, customers of vending machines can easily purchase the batteries and then recharge them at home, using home rechargers. Without a device to prohibit such home recharging, or to make use of a kiosk more advantageous to consumers than is home recharging, kiosk makers cannot recoup the investment in the engineering and manufacturing of automated recharging kiosks. As yet, no kiosks having such advantageous characteristics have been reduced to practice and/or built.
Additionally, due to design limitations, numerous prior art battery charging systems require fast-charging of batteries—dramatically reducing battery life.
Still another deficiency observed in the prior art systems is the ability to place battery recharging kiosks in locations having no access, or unreliable/inconsistent access to public utility power, or where such access is present but the cost of which is prohibitively high. These conditions may restrict the locations where kiosks may be placed to only areas with convenient, reliable, and affordable AC/utility power, and/or alternatively may require previous designs to contain an expensive, heavy, maintenance-prone backup and storage battery.